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Abstract

As we draw near to closing out the twentieth century, we see quite clearly that the information-processing and telecommunications revolutions now underway will continue vigorously into the twenty-first. We interact and transact by directing flocks of digital packets towards each other through cyberspace, carrying love notes, digital cash, and secret corporate documents. Our personal and economic lives rely more and more on our ability to let such ethereal carrier pigeons mediate at a distance what we used to do with face-to-face meetings, paper documents, and a firm handshake. Unfortunately, the technical wizardry enabling remote collaborations is founded on broadcasting everything as sequences of zeros and ones that one's own dog wouldn't recognize. What is to distinguish a digital dollar when it is as easily reproducible as the spoken word? How do we converse privately when every syllable is bounced off a satellite and smeared over an entire continent? How should a bank know that it really is Bill Gates requesting from his laptop in Fiji a transfer of $10,000,000,000 to another bank? Fortunately, the magical mathematics of cryptography can help. Cryptography provides techniques for keeping information secret, for determining that information